Before 28 Years Later’s release, you probably saw its trailers, which featured a recording of man performing a military chant alongside visuals of the film’s destroyed world and infected. That would be “Boots,” a 1903 poem by Jungle Book creator Rudyard Kipling (and performed by Taylor Holmes in 1915) inspired by the monotony of British soldiers marching hundreds of miles in southern Africa. But it’s not just in the trailers, it’s also in the film when Spike and his dad Jamie leave their isolated community for the infected-filled mainland.
Speaking to Variety, director Danny Boyle explained the team wanted something like a song or speech that could “suggest the culture that the island was teaching its children,” and one that “looked back to a time when England was great.” Such behavior, he continued, was “regressive” and “very much linked to Shakespeare,” in particular the Saint Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, which tells of “the noble heroic English beating the French with their bows and arrows.”
During this search, Sony sent Boyle and writer Alex Garland the first trailer for 28 Years Later, and it was like a lightbulb moment. “We were like, ‘Fucking hell!’ It was startling in its power,” he recalled. “The trailer is very good, but there was something more than that about the recording [and] poem. We tried it in our archive sequence, and it was like it was made for it.”
“Boots” has been previously used by the US military in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) schools, and that’s ultimately how it came to 28 Years Later. Megan Barbour, a music director at ad firm Buddha Jones, heard of the recording from a SERE trainee and later sent it to the film’s trailer editor. According to Sony’s David Fruchbom, that first trailer needed to “work off the strength of the visuals,” and Buddha ultimately gave them three versions to choose from—of those, the “Boots” one was “clearly the way to go.”
Audiences would certainly seem to agree, since fans have animated the 28 Years Later or used Holmes’ dramatic reading into videos for Star Wars or other films. Boyle called the entire situation a “reverse osmosis,” saying it “came into the film and seemed to make sense of so much of what we’d been trying to reach for. […] It’s amazing how it still maintains its impact.”
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